Developing a habitability index for Earth’s biosphere

Planet Earth has been continuously habitable for over 3 billion years. During that immense time the Earth has been subject to considerable environmental perturbation, resulting from both intrinsic and extrinsic forces. These range from the smaller-scale, such as solar radiation changes from orbital forcing mechanisms, to the very large scale, such as an asteroid strike. The biosphere has shown considerable resilience to environmental perturbation and provides the only quantifiable measure of habitability available to us in the Cosmos.

In this project, the group seeks to examine and quantify the response of the biosphere to different levels of perturbation.

>> More details about the project can be found here <<

Supervisors: Mark Williams, Tom Harvey, Sergei Petrovskiy and John Maltby
Contact: Mark Williams (mri@le.ac.uk)